skeletorfw

I’m sorry, I’m confused here. I’m obviously all against race science and greenwashing, but I was talking about the quoted study in my post.

That aside, it definitely is good to have more people talking about the inherent subjectivity and impermanence of science though!

Honestly (and I see you do recognise this in your comment) but this really seems like a kinda crappy study that I’m surprised made it into plos.

For instance I couldn’t find any evidence of them considering that the dietary choices of the guardian may affect the attitudes of the guardian to vetenarians (and thus the self-reported health of those animals). To take this further, in the scenario that a cat guardian believes their choices make their cat healthier, especially when going against vetinary orthodoxy, the guardian is probably less likely to take the cat to the vet for minor issues. This confounds the analysis of “healthiness” as performed by the authors.

Furthermore any cat that is not an indoor cat is likely also not fed a purely vegan diet (as they do hunt), so they should possibly account for that via a sort of bootstrapped approach. Generally the stats were okay though, and don’t make super strong claims from some pretty weak data. Though GAMs were a pretty odd choice and I’d have preferred some sort of explicit model fit with Bayesian fitting or NLLS.

In the end all of this points to the sort of thing where they should really have been doing perturbational research. I.e. feeding cats different diets in a controlled lab space. This is not the sort of research that lends itself to surveys and that seriously impacts the actual practicality of its findings.

Also as an aside, I really cannot abide anyone who includes a questionably inspirational quote that they said themselves in the fucking French Alps on their own website. That’s just pure wankery. The only people I usually see doing things like that are scientists like Trivers, which is not company one should wish to be in.

Roland CS-10-EM are excellent binaural mics for a very low cost :)

Even as a Brit that’d be fast. Here you’re funded for 3.5y with 6mo unfunded “writing up time”.

I do love that tidal power is actually just moon power. I think we should call it that more often.

Yeah as an ecologist that same thing made me giggle. I suppose why not the lesser-spotted 🍆warbler :P

In terms of exposing it only to bots, that is a frustration, unless you make it seamless then it does become kinda trivial to mitigate. Otherwise the approach I’d take to mitigate it is to adapt a lemmy client that already does the filtering or reverse-engineer the deciding element of the app. Similarly if you use garbage then you need it to look enough like normal words for it to be hard to classify as AI generated.

The funny thing is that LLMs are not actually much good at telling whether something is ai generated, you need to train another model to do that, but to train that ai you need good sources of non-corrupt data. Also the whole point of generative AI language models is that they are actively trying to pass that test by design so it becomes an arms race that they can never really win!

Man, what a shitshow generative ai is

Radical and altogether stupid idea (but a fun thought) is this:

Were lemmy to have a certain percentage of AI content seamlessly incorporated into its corpus of text, it would become useless for training LLMs on (see this paper for more technical details on the effects of training LLMs on their own outputs, a phenomenon called “model collapse”).

In effect this would sort of “poison the well”, though given that we all drink the water, the hope would be that our tolerance for a mild amount of AI corruption would be higher than an LLM creator’s.

This poisoning approach amusingly benefits from being a thing that could be advertised heavily, basically saying “lemmy is useless for training LLMs, don’t bother with it”.

Now I must say personally I think that I don’t really think this is a sensible or viable strategy, and that I think the well is already poisoned in this regard (as I think there is already a non-negligible amount of LLM-sourced content on lemmy). But yes, a fun approach to consider: trading integrity for privacy.

I mean, just give them money?

Put it this way: getting a job is just one of many challenges facing homeless people.

For example, if you get a job but are already living absolutely hand-to-mouth, can you actually afford to have that first month of work with no money coming in on a day by day basis. If you cannot afford to even eat how will you make it to that first paycheck?

Even if you do, where will your job put that money? Many, many homeless people do not have a bank account, and what do you need to open a bank account? A home address and ID!

Were you fortunate enough to become homeless with a copy of your birth certificate or other form of ID? If not oh that’s not a problem sir, it’ll cost you £35, and then it’ll arrive by recorded delivery to your home address. Where was that again?

Pretty much no person is homeless by choice. Most are there by a combination of bad luck, violence, a lack of a social security net, mental illness, and many many other factors. Very few people would choose a life of danger and unprovoked violence. You wouldn’t want to be without a home, they don’t want to be without a home for the exact same reasons.

So in conclusion, it is the very basics of human decency to feel bad for them. I would urge you to go further and try to help them, whether that be by direct contribution, by volunteering, by donating to a housing charity, or something else.

As mentioned by foggy, jazz harmony (which I frankly suck at) or counterpoint are both the things which will give a formal understanding of this sort of thing.

That said I picked up a lot of it more from playing regularly with people who are much better than me at music. In the end if you immerse yourself in music that uses these ideas more regularly you start encountering strange chord notations and seeing patterns in why they are as they are. Finally it isn’t really a prescriptive thing, there will always be many ways to write the same chord, and it will usually be much of a muchness what is written vs what you actually play.

In the case above I’d probably always write it as a D because for someone trying to learn it quickly they’ll know what a D is more instinctively than a weird augmented minor.

That reads to me as a F#m with an augmented 5th. The notes of a simple tonic triad of D would be D F# A. Meanwhile an F#m would be F# A C#. If you augment that C# to a D and take the second inversion of the chord then you again get D F# A.

The actual reason you would write it like this would really depend on what you are doing musically in the piece more widely. If you were going F#m -> Bm through D as a passing chord, you could consider it as an F#m aug5, however this kinda would make more sense if the other parts of the piece implied that chord to be an F# chord.

In general don’t worry about it too much as often you don’t really mean the alternative representations that it suggests, but there is some fun music theory underlying this.

Ahh yes, that’s the one! Thank you

Yeah that’s the one! Only seen it once (coinciding with a supermoon which was frankly surreal).

Coronas are a bit different I believe, though another one of the same group. I’ve always just called them their individual names, with coronas being tighter and more spectrally-distorting than halos. Maybe the only other collective name I’ve heard would be the minimally descriptive “atmospheric phenomenon” but that’s no fun at all.

Edit: Just took a brief look and indeed coronas are related but formed by refraction through water droplets rather than ice crystals! Cool to know!

That would be a 22° halo, a fairly uncommon atmospheric phenomenon where light refracts through hexagonal ice crystals in the atmosphere resulting in an average deviation from the angle it comes in at by around (funnily enough) 22°.

There are lots of other interesting atmospheric phenomena including sundogs, moonbows, and the much rarer 46° halo!

Honestly no, though I really think this is a factor of how close to a pole you are. It’s hard enough to deal with the dark coldness, not getting bright til like 10am would be even worse.

Not at all, but it does add context. I’m sure you agree the phrase “build a wall” has a significantly different implication to what it had in 2005.

Well a dictionary is descriptive, and so describes how people use words. It’ll change with societal meaning as it always has.

I am very much a scientist here specifically I am a biologist but we weren’t doing science in this meme were we? More specifically we weren’t asking what gender the people in the image had.

Nonetheless maybe it’s easier to think of gender like a name. You are given one at birth and you don’t get to choose it. For the majority of people they’re okay with their name. Others feel that their name doesn’t fit them and so change it. If you don’t know someone’s name then I assume you don’t just call them “Bob”, you probably ask them what their name is. Same goes with pronouns, you can just ask. Or if they seem like if you ask they’ll punch your face in, maybe just assume, that is okay in context.

In the end we’re not very different in age, I do understand that the world changes and adds an extra load to the stresses you already face. That said it really is just a case of trying not to assume too much and bring chill if someone says “hey actually I’d prefer they rather than she”. You are really unlikely to get cancelled by anyone that matters if you just say “oh of course, I’ll remember that”.

I say that as someone who has definitely put my foot in it many times before when not understanding a social nuance and making a faux pas.

Sorry, bit of a long one here, but bear with me ♥️

Specifically it is more often in the phrase “biological females”.

It’s a very unnatural way to refer to a person, and as such is usually a very specifically chosen wording. In a very literal sense everyone who can be described as female can also be described as biological, however here the term has an implied delineation in it. A “biological” and a “non-biological” or “artificial” female. This is where the anti-transness comes in; the appeal to nature of “artificial” women being inferior to the “biological” women.

Now there’s an extra little bit of subtlety here in that it often is contextual. Usually you would not refer to a person as a female as a noun, but rather as female as an adjective. There is a significant subset of people thus who use “female” as a noun either as a substitute for “biological female” or sometimes just as a chauvinistic way of dehumanising women. Either way it’s rarely a good look.

The anti-trans movement, and the right wing in general has a distinct trend in not quite saying what they mean too. So in the same way that the right wing will demonise “groomers”, “scroungers”, and “the woke left” (i.e. LGBTQ+ people, the homeless, anyone that will call them out), the TERFs will demonise the implied “non-biological” females.

It is a parlour trick, an extremely thin veneer of plausible deniability that means they can go “nooooo you’re overreacting, I never SAID that I hate trans people, I just don’t like it when people deny that biology exists”. It’s a way of shutting down arguments so the right wing can say whatever they want with impunity.

Tldr: some nasty folk use “females” as a shorthand for “biological human females” which is a very terfy phrase in the same way as “blood and soil” is very distinctly fascistic.

In this particular case however I don’t think that the reddit OP was being a terf and the mods were definitely just flat out wrong. It probably warranted a post removal and a warning but not a ban.

In the case of logging sillyness it definitely feels something like

DEBUG: Tree
DEBUG: Tree
DEBUG: Tree
DEBUG: Tree
ERROR: Wood
DEBUG: Tree
DEBUG: Tree
DEBUG: Tree

Sublems is an absolutely fantastic word that I am now adopting! E.g. “Hopefully soon Jerboa handles sublem links better in comments. That’s something I loved about Relay”