I peer pressure many of my friends into using adblockers and other tech stuff that gives them more agency.

Something that I’m especially chuffed with is that a I actually caused a friend to switch to open source software for scientific research. She’s doing a psychology PhD was getting frustrated with the online experiment setup on the no-code experiment builder she had been advised to use. The platform didn’t allow her to input the experiment parameters she needed and she was complaining to me, and so I had a gander at it, out of curiosity.

I expected there’d be some documentation showing how to use the experiment builder, but there was nothing I could find. Everywhere I looked, there were just more sales pitches. It seems that my friend was only using it because the university had a license for it.

I exclaimed that the lack of documentation and features was ridiculous, given that there’s almost certainly an open source equivalent that does more, is free, and almost certainly better documented. I said that flippantly, but then went and researched that. I showed her a few different options and she ended up going for one called PsychoPy.

As one might be able to gather from the name, that’s not a no-code experiment builder, but rather one that uses Python. However, for my friend, this was a feature, not a bug; although she didn’t already know Python, she was keen to learn — “what’s a PhD for if not to learn how to do actual science?”.

I found it quite affirming because I don’t know if she would have had this thought if not for me. I’m very much a jack of all trades, master of none, due to having many different interests and being spread relatively thin between them. I’m a better programmer than the majority of scientists in my field that I’ve known, but probably worse than most people who actually write code for their jobs. However, gaining expertise in the more computery (and in some cases, philosophical) side of science makes me feel like I’ve “diluted” my scientific expertise compared to my peers. It’s nice that this problem was one at the intersection of my knowledge areas.

Any noun’s a verb if you noun hard enough

Oh man, that was so good, thanks for sharing it. I’m a big fan of both metal and interesting covers of songs, so this is my jam. I anticipate that I’m going to listen to the songs from this album so much that my housemates will get sick of them

This song has no right to go as hard as it does, but the world is better for it

That would be cool. A version of this emailed at middle schoolers could be really interesting and interdisciplinary.

When you’re a member of a marginalised group, it’s easy to just become dead to it, because it’s just part of your regular life. You can’t do anything about it, so it’s either die, or just get on with it as best you can. This is pragmatically necessary, but it’s easy to end up internalising a bunch of unhealthy stuff and begin feeling like the suffering you face is your fault. It’s a slow process, where you just sort of forget that you’re suffering an injustice, because it’s just normal.

My late best friend was like in the OP. He would often be shocked and outraged at some of the things I face as a disabled person, and it was always jarring in a way that reminded me of how bullshit it is that I have to face some stuff. He’d say things that would make me go “Yeah! That is fucked up”. Being angry at a thing doesn’t necessarily make things any better, nor does it make it easier to bear, but getting angry at myself (which inevitably happens if I slip into internalised ableism) definitely makes things harder.

Recognising my suffering as oppression is also a powerful step towards finding community and building solidarity, which is a useful step towards concrete political change

I feel like I just got goatsed by Saturn

I think a key distinction is that the religious rhetoric is often precisely that — rhetoric. Specifically, it’s rhetoric aimed at an international audience, because conflating Judaism with the Israeli state is essential to how Israel frames itself and its genocide. It allows them to denounce all criticism of zionism as antisemitism, even if those critiques are coming from Jewish antizionists. Meanwhile, Israel’s actions have been helping drive an increase in actual antisemitism, which is also useful for Israel, because it helps them to justify the existence of Israel as necessary for Jewish safety.

That might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s important if we want to understand what’s happening. Many of the most vehement pro-genocide voices in Israel are secular Jews, as is a decent proportion of Jews in Israel. Judaism is more than just a religion, but an ethnoreligious group, and that distinction is important because Israel cares more about the “ethno-” part of that than the religious part (because like I say, there are many people who identify as secular Jews).

It’s somewhat analogous to how Trump performs a particular kind of conservative Christian rhetoric that’s more about white nationalism than any Christian ideals. The religious component is important to acknowledge, because many prominent MAGAs aren’t doing it performatively in the way that Trump and some others do, but rather their Christian faith is tightly intertwined with their white nationalism. However, to see this purely as a religious issue would lose crucial nuance of the issue.

The Swiss literally collaborated with the literal Nazis.

Oftentimes, they are successful. There are certainly times when a wealthy person who tries this ends up failing in their attempt, but it doesn’t stand out much because there’s a certain level of rich-people-assholey that’s almost expected, where people will disapprove, but in an unsurprised way.

Streisand’s case was absurd to the highest degree, which was why it blew up. The photo wasn’t even of her house, but an aerial shot of the coast which also captured many other houses. Her house was just incidentally in the image, and even if you zoom in close enough to try see details of the house, the resolution is so low that I can’t fathom anyone genuinely believing it was an invasion of privacy.

What’s more, the purpose of the aerial photos was to document coastal erosion as research for policy making. Especially back in the early 2000s, I’d bet that the majority of photographers sued under invasion of privacy laws were paparazzi, and this is completely different circumstances. People found Streisand’s response offensive because she was obstructing a project that was for the public good. It’s likely that there were other people whose homes were included in photographs from this project who wouldn’t be keen on that prospect, but sucked it up because it’s not like they were actively trying to photograph people’s houses, and coastal erosion is a pretty big deal for people living on the coast.

Though I imagine most people would be unaware their homes were even captured. I remember that the photo in question had only been downloaded 6 times — two of those times were her attorneys.

Though actually I just learned that her beef was actually far more reasonable than I’d realised — unlike other homes that were labelled anonymously, with latitude and longitude coordinates, hers was labelled as belonging to her. Given the awfulness of paparazzi and stalkers, I actually think wanting her name off of it was reasonable. Since then, she’s made it clear that this was all she wanted, and one of the legal documents I just skimmed aligns with that. I can’t imagine why the photographer wouldn’t have just acquiesced to that request before it got all the way to court (by which point, he’d accrued $177k in legal fees). I wonder if perhaps the initial cease and desist sent to the photographer framed it more like a request to remove the photo entirely.

She writes and talks about Trump because she feels that the insight that she has on the fucked up dynamic of the Trump family is useful in understanding the mindset of one of the most powerful men in the world. People care about what she says, and thus give her a platform, because they agree that her analysis is useful and interesting.

In terms of her agenda, if I were her, saddled with the curse of that name and the toxic family that comes with it, I would feel it my duty to do everything I could to criticise Trump, especially given that her name means that her words would carry weight even if her perspective wasn’t especially interesting (I do find her work interesting — she doesn’t just coast off of the name, but also draws on her experience as someone with a PhD in psychology). Hell, even outside of that hypothetical, I already do consider it my duty to oppose Trump however I can; it’s just that that amounts to very little given that I’m a Brit with no political power). Trump is such a repugnant human that surely we don’t need to grasp for some nefarious underlying agenda to explain why she’d criticise him.

That was a great story, thanks for sharing. I love how the voice of the article sounds exactly like I’d expect from the kind of article we might read today. It reminded me a little of the 1972 “Lenna image” of Lena Forsén in Playboy that was frequently used for illustrating image processing algorithms (a practice that is now banned in most relevant journals.

I also liked how the story mentioned fiction about brain uploading. That was very meta, and I enjoyed it to an unreasonable degree.

A form of wage theft that’s common in the US (and elsewhere) is that workers are expected to still do work when they have already clocked out (such as closing up the shop).

I have a Japanese friend who told me that it’s not uncommon that if your work colleagues are going to the bar after work, you are expected to go along. If you don’t, it shows a lack of commitment to your job. As it’s not a formal requirement, of course you don’t get paid for this, despite it being functionally mandatory. What’s worse is that you can’t just stick around for one drink and then head home — you are expected to stick around at least as long as your boss, even if he (let’s face it, the boss is probably male) is still drinking long into the night. I consider this to be an especially egregious form of the wage theft I described above.

It sounds so exhausting that I would likely be unable to do anything besides pretend to work, and even that would lead to inevitable burn out. I had heard that the work culture in Japan was bad, but I had no idea how bad until my friend shared some first hand experiences with me.

The problem is that’s not what they’re doing, even after people who volunteered time to work on localisation have asked for the AI to not overwrite existing human-translated documents. That’s the bare minimum, but it seems like it’s too much for Mozilla

I am filled with rage whenever I hear stuff talking about the ceasefire as if it still exists. At least articles like this call it like it is. My view is that a ceasefire can only be broken once, and then there would need to be a new ceasefire arranged. Israel broke the ceasefire not long after it was put in place, so it’s utterly absurd we’re still talking about the ceasefire as if it still exists.

It’s not faked

“If they made the door easier to open, then they would be suing on behalf of kids who fell out.”

That doesn’t seem to be a problem for the vast majority of cars with regular handles. There’s no excuse for Tesla’s shoddy engineering. I don’t have particular comment on the acceleration thing, because I agree that seems like it could just be due to depressing the wrong pedal. The door handles are a different matter. When the car first came out, experts were saying that this would end up killing people, and whaddya know — they did.

I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.

I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.

I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.

For better or for worse, her name and her connection to RFK junior gives her a platform. She is leveraging this, in combination with her terminal cancer diagnosis, to criticise someone who is actively undermining public health. I think that’s a pretty admirable thing to do, and as long as there are assholes like RFK jr fucking things up, criticism of them is important, whatever the source.

“Any attempt to quantitative measure intelligence is pro eugenics.”

Oh definitely, I’m with you on that, 100%. Regardless, it’s not productive to just accuse people of being eugenicists when it’s infinitely more likely that they weren’t aware of how problematic it is to frame intelligence in the way they did.

I’m firmly of the belief that far more important than any seemingly innate intelligence is the support and opportunities for learning that we have access to. It sounds like this is in line with what you think also. That in mind, I hope you can see why your initial comment wasn’t helpful towards anyone learning.

IQ is borne out of an ideology in which there is a class of special people, who should do all the thinking, and everyone else, who should just be mindless drones. Rejecting that ideology means reckoning with the fact that our thinking and reasoning capacities depend massively on our circumstances — and our ability to grow is limited by not knowing what we don’t know. For me, recognising that we’re all equal in all the ways that count means that I feel a duty to facilitate people having access to opportunities to learn and grow. I’m not saying that you should feel obligated to explain complex topics to people who you don’t know will even be receptive, but I am saying that the least you could do is avoid lowering the quality of the discourse.

I initially took the time to reply to you because although your comment was hostile and unnecessary, I have enough background knowledge on the topic to guess that you’re someone who is well-informed and principled. Indeed, it sounds like your views here are quite similar to my own. You could’ve written a comment that might’ve usefully challenged the person you replied to, and it’s a shame we didn’t get to see that.