Contramuffin

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Contramuffin,

That’s when the malicious compliance kicks in. Start a new ticket with a picture of your monitor, with the entire screen taped off. Ask why you can’t find your mouse

Contramuffin,

Like anything labeled indie: mountains of garbage, with some god-tier works sitting on top. The only issue is sifting through the garbage

Contramuffin,

YouTuber who ran a charity for something like 10 years, recently it came out that he kept all the money that was donated. What was supposed to happen is that he takes the donations, then donates that to another charity. When called out, his excuse was that he “forgot to donate the money.”

Contramuffin,

the bacteria Penicillium roqueforti

I don’t think that article knows what a bacterium is. Penicillium is a fungus.

Contramuffin,

Neither side, really, but you can generally be certain that the Republican party is the one most against legalizing marijuana.

Contramuffin,

Not an answer, but I do want to point out that your question may be missing a crucial point. Primarily: There are different types of capitalism. When people mock or complain about the current economy, you might hear about “late stage capitalism.” That’s because that’s referring to the current type of capitalism that we’re operating under. And Bernie Sanders believes in capitalism, too. But his belief is in a different type of capitalism.

This is all to say, when people complain, it may not even be that they want to replace capitalism, but even shifting to a more friendly type of capitalism would significantly remove a lot of strain from workers. I don’t mean to imply that that’s what the people you’re referring to meant, but I think it is important to consider that criticism against capitalism does not necessarily mean a full shift away from capitalism

Contramuffin,

I think social media has the ability to make things impossible to ignore, things that previously people were able to ignore.

Things such as police brutality, mass shootings, for instance, probably were just as common back then as it is now. But now we’re paying attention to it. I think it’s the same thing here. People have always had a different public and personal life. It would be incredibly odd if someone didn’t. But social media is making people pay attention to the fact that there’s some people whose private lives are ugly, but who try to project a perfect public life anyways.

Contramuffin,

Strangely, the opposite for me. Recently (and I mean a couple months ago), I’ve been noticing that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm changed in some way. It’s now recommending me things that I’m not particularly interested in, or things that I would click away from more readily. I used to like educational channels (SciShow, PBS Spacetime, Deep Look, PBS Eons, etc.) and I’m noticing that these videos are almost never recommended to me anymore. I have to go to their channel to even see that they posted a video.

Contramuffin,

Braid was one of my first games, and still one of my favorite puzzle games. I’m legitimately pretty hyped about this, even if it doesn’t really need a remake

Contramuffin,

I think it’s a combination of low development cost (so a single update can bring in enough income to last at least several months to a year), and the fact that they target a particular audience which constantly has an influx of new players.

Minecraft is a good example - they primarily target the younger demographic, and as long as people are born, there will always be new young people who haven’t bought Minecraft yet. And every update will be talked about on media and on YouTube, and that’ll convince those new young people to buy Minecraft.

We see the opposite side of the same coin with Pokemon, where there will always be people willing to buy the new Pokemon game, even if it’s essentially just the same thing as the previous games. It’s not because the new game is good, it’s just because there’s always going to be children who want to experience Pokemon for the first time

Contramuffin,

The one advice I can give you is, women are closer to men than you may think. Whatever you find interesting, there’s someone out there who would think so too. Whatever disgusts you, probably disgusts women too. IMO, dating advice that includes phrases such as “as a man” are misleading, because they imply that women are fundamentally different and must be treated differently.

Treat them as you would a friend, rather than something to be won, and you’ll find that people will be more receptive. 25 years old is still plenty young

Contramuffin,

Left girl wants a needy but not overbearing boyfriend.

Right girl says that left girl wants a dog

Contramuffin,

My understanding is that fish are relatively high in omega-3 fatty acids. I believe they’re important in neuronal function and cardiovascular function. Regardless, the media took the 2 facts and conflated the two to say that eating fish = lots of omega-3 fatty acids = good neuronal health = become smart

You’ll find that the media does this quite a lot - they take reputable scientific research and extrapolate it so far outside its intended use case that the resulting news report is complete garbage

Contramuffin,
  1. Social media owned by companies, by their nature, undergo enshittification. It may not be now, but it will happen sometime in the future.
  2. If we make social media that is owned and controlled by the people, we can avoid enshittification
  3. The Fediverse is an attempt to create social media owned by the people.

All the analogies about email and whatnot, or the comments trying to explain how federation works, they’re missing a big part of the question. They’re not technically wrong, but those answers are exactly what put me off the Fediverse initially. And I suspect those answer will put off other people, too. And it should be relatively clear why, if you think about it from newbies’ perspectives: the question that newbies are asking is what the Fediverse is. Trying to answer how the Fediverse works is avoiding the question entirely. You can’t explain the “how” to someone if they don’t even know what it is. It’s like explaining how to design a software to a caveman, without explaining what a software is.

Contramuffin,

I misread the sign in the back as “GIRAFFE,” and that makes the entire image funnier

Contramuffin,

Hmm, that’s difficult. Some electronic hardware stores take in batteries (Microcenter comes to mind, but I bet others do something similar). I think some libraries take in batteries too, but I don’t recall where I heard that, or if i just misremembered - could be worth checking your local library if they do.

If nothing else, universities basically always have a battery disposal, but the bins themselves can be frustratingly difficult to find sometimes

Contramuffin,

This, entirely. I remember back 10, 15 years ago, rechargeable batteries were trash. Gave them a second shot recently, and I’m genuinely surprised. They’re as good, possibly even better than, non-rechargeables

Contramuffin,

Here’s an unusual one - an M.2 SSD to USB adapter.

Most, if not all, laptops come with SSD’s nowadays, and they’re usually pretty easy to take out from a laptop. Gather some old, broken laptops, and take out their SSD’s. They’re so much faster than USB flash drives, I prefer to use SSD’s where possible. Plus, it helps with e-waste

Contramuffin,

This is it for me. I don’t go through many laptops on my own, but ask around your family? You can get quite a stack of e-waste pretty quickly. Especially if you’ve already been labeled the “tech guy” of the family

Contramuffin,

It’s been a while since I played Okami, I think I just kept trying till I eventually got it.

Ironically, it was the fishing that got me to give up my completionist run. Couldn’t get one fish that supposedly was common. Spent at least 4 hours constantly fishing before I gave up

Contramuffin,

It seems like Google changed the format of their YouTube usernames. I assume usernames need to be unique now, but I don’t know for sure.

In any case, Google automatically added a string of numbers after my username, and I simply haven’t bothered changing it back

Contramuffin,

Amber Heard: Johnny Depp’s ex-wife. There was a highly popularized court case recently where it was revealed that she was highly abusive toward Depp, both physically and mentally. In one case, she threw a wine bottle at him, resulting in one of Depp’s fingers being smashed apart. He had to go to the hospital to get it repaired. After the divorce, she would claim (and still claims) that Depp was the abusive one in the relationship.

Jada Pinkett Smith: Will Smith’s wife. People have been picking apart the relationship recently and have realized that Jada does not love Will Smith. In fact, it seems that Jada is doing everything in her power to humiliate Will. She has admitted, without any remorse or shame, that she has cheated on Will with her son’s friend. And in interviews, she would constantly speak badly of Will. Despite this, Will appears unwilling to let Jada go, and appears to still love her

Contramuffin,

Ah yes. In addition, it’s only polite to refer to yourself as “ore,” and a true gentleman will also refer to everyone with the -chan suffix.

Contramuffin,

Whatever rule you set, be transparent about it, be open to feedback about it, and enforce it fairly.

I think most powertripping mods end up being unlikable due to one of several reasons:

  • passes a new rule that people don’t like. Refuses to (or pretends to) listen to feedback when people get upset about it
  • enforces an existing rule more harshly against people they don’t like, often to the point where the mod would first decide that a user should be banned, and then try to find a justification for banning that user. (As opposed to the normal process, where a mod notices rule breaking, and then decides whether the user should be banned)
  • Complementing the previous point, gets into petty arguments. Mods are meant to be the role model of the community, and that inherently means being the “bigger man” basically all the time. You need to be able to take insults and know not to respond.

Hypothetically speaking, what alterations to our biology/genome would need to occur in order for us to be able to safely drink saltwater?

Could we, in theory, use something like CRISPR to give a new baby replacement super-kidneys (or whatever organ it is that makes drinking saltwater be a bad time)? It seems like if we cracked that, we’d be set as a species....

Contramuffin,

Not a direct answer, but I want to point out that if you’re considering a technology that will help improve poor people’s lives, you must also consider that technology is prone to the same issues that caused the wealth disparity in the first place. Namely, that only rich people can afford new technologies. Suppose if we really are able to edit human genes to let people drink salt water. Would poor people (the people who may actually need this technology) be able to afford it? Or will it end up just becoming a gimmick for rich people?

As others have pointed out, there’s really no need to be able to drink salt water, since we already have the technology to desalinate water. It’s only that poorer areas don’t have the funding to build desalination plants. You can start to see that it’s the same issue as what I said above - there’s a new technology that would theoretically help poor areas, but then it ends up not benefiting poor people because they can’t afford the technology.

All of this is not to say that new technology is bad. It’s simply that we already have solutions for a lot of societal issues, and the reason we still have those problems is simply because we as a society don’t care enough to distribute the benefits of those solutions fairly

Did you find Tear of the Kingdom difficult?

I played BotW a lot, and really loved it. I feel like the beginning of the game was relatively easy compared to TotK, I died a few times trying out things, discovering the game and possibilities ; in TotK I died a lot and still do even with good gear and armour (1*-2* armors, 30-40+ damage weapons). You could say it’s skill...

Contramuffin,

I agree, the early game is definitely harder in ToTK than in BotW. The vibe feels a bit similar to Noita, IMO, in that the odds are stacked against you, and you offset the disadvantage by making liberal use of as many overpowered combos as you can think of.

Anyways, my advice is really just that. Find good combos, and spam the hell out of them. One easy thing to do is to burn chuchu jellies to create red chuchu jellies. Then, fuse them onto arrows to create incendiary arrows. Great for dealing with crowds, and the explosion radius isn’t as big as a bomb flower, so there’s less chance of you accidentally killing yourself. Red chuchu jellies’s function similarly to fire fruits, but I just find that it’s easier to get a ton of red chuchu jellies.

If you’re in snowy areas, you can also shoot down some icicles and fuse them onto spears. That freezes any enemy that it hits, which is good if you get surrounded easily. You can also collect ice fruit/white chuchu jellies to make freezing arrows.

In general, you get way more arrows in ToTK than in BotW, so your playstyle will naturally need to lean a bit more into long range combat to make effective use of your resources

Here’s a couple other interesting interactions you can take advantage of:

  • find (or ultrahand) a heavy object. Drop it onto the enemy.
  • wind staggers enemies. If you find an enemy charging up an attack, take out a guster and blow wind at the enemy
Contramuffin, (edited )

I’ve played both Diamond and Brilliant Diamond. To be honest, I don’t get where the hate is coming from for BD. It’s got a ton of quality-of-life changes compared to Diamond. If you had the choice between the two, I would certainly recommend BD, especially if you’re used to the the QoL from the newer Pokemon games. Whether or not BD is worth the money is a separate question entirely… but at least that can be solved by consulting some online “vendors,” if you catch my drift

As for S/M and US/UM, what I’ve heard is that S/M has a more coherent story. US/UM apparently chose to abandon the story near the end and shoehorn in an incoherent ending, with the intention of using the new ending to build up a stronger post-story game. The choice boils down to whether you care about the story more or whether you care about the post-game content more

Contramuffin,

It’s an antimeme. The original meme is meant to show 2 separate, unrelated objects, with the implication that the first thing was destroyed in the process of creating the second object. In this case, the first object (wheat) really is used to create the second object (bread), hence the antimeme

Contramuffin,

Anon could have salvaged this if he didn’t run away. It could have made for a killer party story

Contramuffin,

No, just say that you thought the other person was being serious and laugh it off. Maybe tell it to the other party-goers. Heck, give them a book so that you don’t need to lug so many books around. They get a laugh and a memorabilia for the story, you get to play it off. People go along with stupid shit all the time, they won’t judge you for a single “ok, that’s weird but I’ll do it” moment.

Honestly, most things are only awkward if you make it awkward.

Contramuffin,

These are people at a party. People do wild things at a party all the time. Under normal circumstances, sure, I would say you’re right. But at a party, anything goes. Honestly, Anon found himself in the best of positions and screwed it up. It was perhaps the only circumstance where someone could say, “let’s do some stupid shit that makes zero sense and goes completely against our beliefs and values,” and other people would just say, “lol sure why not”

Contramuffin,

You don’t even need to say that it’s a joke. You were told that it was going to be a Christian book burning party. I think most people would assume by default that you just went with it because you didn’t know what else to do. Peer pressure works, and nobody’s going to fault you for that. Especially if you make it clear that you don’t actually believe in burning books.

Honestly if people were going to give you shit, it would most likely be for getting bamboozled. And that’s significantly more salvageable than whatever Anon did

Contramuffin,

You’re acting like everyone expects everyone else to be a paragon of virtue all the time. Peer pressure works so well that people gave it a name. People get peer pressured into drugs and crime all the time. Of all the things that Anon could have gotten peer pressured into, a book burning party is honestly one of the most harmless things that he could have gotten into.

The truth isn’t damning if the truth is literally just “yeah lol I felt like I had to fit in.” People would think you’re gullible, but people won’t think you’re malicious

Contramuffin,

Disclaimer: I’m not a physicist, but I am a scientist. Science as a whole is usually taught in school as though we already know everything there is to know. That’s not really accurate.

Science is really sort of a black box system. We know that if you do this particular thing at this particular time, then we get this particular response. Why does that response happen? Nobody really knows. There’s a lot of “vague” or unknown things in all of science, physics included. And to be clear, that’s not invalidating science. Most of the time, just knowing that we’ll get a consistent response is enough for us to build cool technologies.

One of the strangest things I’ve heard about in physics is the quantum eraser experiment, and as far as I’m aware, to this day nobody really knows why it happens. PBS Spacetime did a cool video on it: youtu.be/8ORLN_KwAgs?si=XqjFEjDfmnZX31Mn

Contramuffin,

I am generally somewhat skeptical about your comment. Sure, I hadn’t heard about Sabine’s video about the quantum eraser, but I don’t necessarily think that it disproves the idea that physics is never vague or unknown.

Perhaps it is different in physics than my own field, but if you read enough primary papers, enough lit reviews, at least in my field, you’ll see some common themes come up. Things such as “further research is required to determine this mechanism,” “the factors that are involved are unknown,” “it is unclear why this occurs.” Actually, your suggestion that nothing is vague is entirely counter to my entire field of science. When we introduce ourselves in our field, we start off with a sentence about what we do not know. And perhaps it is my bias, having worked in my field, but I cannot see how any scientist could possibly say that nothing is vague.

To me, my interpretation is that “science is not vague” is itself a symptom of popular science. “Science is mystical” is simply a symptom of a slightly different disease - the disease of poor popular science communication. But I think that’s distinctly different from the question, which is asking if anything was vague. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Contramuffin,

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I see that we interpreted the question differently, based on what we thought was the issue of science communication. Which I think is really interesting!

I see what you mean - the people who impose their fantasies onto the science, who seemingly think there is some sort of “science god” who determines what fact is true on which days. Certainly, they are a problem. My experiences with non-scientific folk have actually usually been something of the opposite. They think that science is overly rigid and unchanging. They believe that science is merely a collection of facts to be memorized and models to be applied. Perhaps this is just the flip side of the same problem (maybe these people interpret changes in our knowledge to be evidence that there is no such thing as true facts?)

The difference in interpretation might stem from a difference in our fields. I assume you study physics. And I must assume that scientific rigor in physics depends on being certain about your discoveries. In my field (disease and pathogenesis), the biggest challenge is, surprisingly enough, convincing people that diseases are important things that need to be studied. Or perhaps that’s not a big surprise, given the public’s response to COVID-19. Even grant readers have to be convinced that there is merit in studying your disease of interest.

When I speak of my research to non-scientific people, a lot of the times the response is simply, “why not just use antibiotics? Why do we care about how diseases happen when we can just treat it?” A lot of my field, even in undergraduate programs, is dedicated to breaking down the notion that “we know enough, so don’t bother looking deeper.” I think there’s a very strong mental undercurrent in my field that we know next to nothing, and that we need to very quickly expand our knowledge before conventional medical science, especially our overreliance on antibiotics, gives out and fails. For instance, did you know that one of the most fundamental infection-detecting systems in our bodies (pattern recognition receptors) was discovered in mammals just over 20 years ago? The idea of pattern recognition receptors is literally only college-age.

So I actually find it interesting that you interpret the question so differently. It’s a testament to how anti-science rhetoric manifests in different ways to different fields

Contramuffin,

I get what you’re saying. I thought that myself, that it would be niche. Then I got it and now it’s part of my standard carry. I think the tricky thing about it is that it doesn’t do anything surprising, so you wouldn’t expect that it would be so successful. But once you try it yourself, you realize that the appeal is primarily in how balanced and versatile it is. In other words, it doesn’t do anything new, but it does everything that it tries to do very well

Contramuffin,

You sound like a social liberal, economic conservative.

To be clear - being socially liberal doesn’t mean that you want to be LGBTQ. It doesn’t mean that you want to be atheist. It just means that you believe other people should be allowed to be that. So you can still be Muslim and have a traditional family and still be considered socially liberal.

As for your question, that’s quite tough. American Democrats are, politically speaking, probably the closest group of people I can think of. But somehow, people think that Democrats are socialist, so your mileage may vary

Contramuffin,

Printer ink cartridges. Printer manufacturers are using a loss leader pricing scheme, and I don’t like it. Let them compete!

Contramuffin,

More active niche communities popping up here and there! The strength and number of niche communities still don’t match those of niche communities on Reddit, but I take it as a good sign of healthy growth.

It’s just slightly annoying to have to check in every once in a while for niche communities that sprung up since the last time I checked

Contramuffin,

Anon didn’t even fumble this one. The coworker did, and then anon thought he was the one who f’ed up

Seriously, though. How often do you think of the Roman Empire?

I know this is a joke/meme, but I sincerely think of the Roman Empire a surprising amount of times. I find myself obsessing over how Roman citizens were living just as complex lives as we are today, or about Marcus Aurelius’ life and philosophy, or about how the Republic fell and became a totalitarian state.

Contramuffin,

Julius and Augustus didn’t add a month. They replaced a month. The 6th and 7th months had different names, and they simply renamed them to July and August. The actual reason why the month names don’t match up is because Romans originally only counted “business months,” kinda akin to how we count weekdays way more than we count weekends. In any case, no (or little) business was happening in the winter, so they just simply don’t count months during the winter. Those uncounted months would correspond to January and February. When January and February were added, people decided to put them in the front of the calendar rather than at the back. Hence, the 8th month (October) became the 10th month, and so on for all the months.

You can read a bit more from the Wikipedia page here: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar#Romulus

Contramuffin,

If I recall correctly, it was mainly political. I’m not an expert in this topic at all, I’m just regurgitating what I read. But from what I remember, it was something along the lines of elections occur at the end of the year, and by placing January and February at the beginning rather than at the end, the new year would more closely coincide with office terms

Contramuffin,

Slightly overblown. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a powerful tool. But it’s just a tool. It’s not some sort of sentient being. In my field of work (research), we found out pretty quickly that ChatGPT was virtually worthless, since the stuff that we were doing was so new and novel that ChatGPT hasn’t got training data on it yet. But you could use it as a glorified Google and ask it questions if there was some part of the protocol that you didn’t understand. And honestly that pretty much encapsulates my stance on the matter: good at rehashing and summarizing old information, but terrible at generating or organizing new information.

Honestly, what I’m worried about is that the hype around AI is causing too many people to have an over-reliance on AI, and not realizing the limitations until it’s too late. A good example would be the case that was on the news a month or two ago about the lawyer who got in trouble because he used ChatGPT to write his case for him and it ended up making up court cases for citations. Suppose if some company puts an LLM as its CEO (which I feel fairly confident that some techbro is doing somewhere in the world). The company may be able to coast during fair weather and times of good business, but I am concerned that things will crash and burn when things aren’t going well. And I think that’s really the crux of it - AI is good enough that it looks competent when it’s not being stretched to its limits. And that’s leading too many people to think that AI is competent, always.

Contramuffin,

Yeah. I can’t imagine myself doing any sort of math beyond basic units conversion for my work. The entire experience just put me off math completely

Contramuffin,

No, nothing happened to her. She left the school the year that I graduated from middle school, so she’s no longer traumatizing children in my middle school anymore at least. That being said, I’m not sure if she moved to another school or not

Contramuffin,

I haven’t heard of the movie before, but briefly looking over the synopsis, yeah, it was pretty similar to what my experience was like. It feels like kind of a shame, because I feel like I might have actually done pretty well and learned a lot if the advisor was more supportive. I don’t particularly regret it though, since I’m pretty satisfied with my current career path, and I feel like I wouldn’t be where I am now if not for going through that experience.

Contramuffin,

I’m personally not in favor of Mastodon posts, since the format (and therefore type of discussion that occurs there) is different than on Lemmy. That being said, my understanding is that many people would disagree with me, and I’m generally in favor of having options as opposed to not having options.

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