Tangentially related: I really enjoyed the EULA of Baldur’s Gate 3:

I think it works best with an adjective that has 3+ syllables. E.g. You incorrigible turnip You reprehensible teapot You abominable spoon You acephalous sandwich

Step 1: someone says trans people are bad and wrong (subtext: and therefore we should do something about it)

“Oh, but I’m just expressing my opinion. What’s wrong with that? Am I not allowed to have opinions anymore? Surely you are the actually intolerant one, because I only implied that I don’t think trans people should exist by saying they are bad and wrong”

It’s frustrating because subtext does exist and matter. They only acknowledge the subtext in their bigoted assertions when it’s convenient for them.

Edit: accidentally a word

A sentiment I’ve heard a bunch is “oh, so you called us Indians and now you’re uncomfortable with that label? Well fuck you, you don’t get to keep unilaterally changing what’s acceptable. If thinking about colonialism makes you uncomfortable, then great! Start sitting with that discomfort and recognising the crumb of self determination that we express by identifying as Indians. You gave us that label, and it’s ours now.”

A phrase I read a while back that has pretty dystopian vibes but is pretty useful as a concept is “algorithm domestication”. It’s more or less what you describe in your comment.

I think there’ll always be weird nerds getting excited about niche things. It’s exhausting to have to keep finding new spaces, but to some extent, I think that’s our lot in life: we’re like lyme-grass growing in sand dunes — pioneer species that grow where other things can’t (or won’t), putting down roots so other things can grow.

Unfortunately, the pioneer grasses can’t survive indefinitely in the communities they build; their existence acts as a windbreak and encourages more sand to settle, causing the sand dune to form quicker than they can grow, eventually being smothered by the dunes they helped established. They have to find somewhere else to grow, somewhere new — the sand dune of tomorrow. That’s why, when there’s a series of sand dunes at a beach, you see a sort of progression, moving from more established sand dunes to younger ones as you get closer to the shore.

Maybe in 20 years, Linux will be unrecognisable to us, and maybe that space will no longer be home to nerds like us. But we’ll always find something new to be excited about; the community won’t be vaporised, it’ll just be rejigged a bunch, as we discover new areas to put down roots. That is sad, but I think the alternative would be sadder, in a way. I don’t mean if Linux doesn’t become widely adopted, but if people stop trying to push for that — at the core of this movement/community is a bunch of people saying “hey, look at this really cool thing I care about”.

It’s easy to blame the Marram grasses for crowding out the early pioneers, but we do this to ourselves, by building tools for others to use, and working on outreach. In a way, that’s how we survive, because our community relies on people who are excited about building something new in an unexplored problem space; more gatekeepy communities may maintain their “ideological purity” for longer, but they inevitably die out.

It sucks to feel crowded out by the masses, but there’ll always be new spaces for people like us, because we’re good at building and tinkering. After all, look at where we are right now. Lemmy isn’t especially radical or new, but the atmosphere here is incredibly different to Reddit. I’m way more likely to find thought provoking discussions like this thread, for example, and to care enough to write comments like this.

Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).

Yay learning

Do you apply toppings right to the edge? I’ve never had this problem despite using an absurd amount of cheese, and I was puzzling to figure out why. I think it’s because the crust rises up to act like a boundary that encloses a big lake of cheese.

I agree that sometimes it’s possible to separate the art from the artist. Sometimes that’s pretty easy to do, but sometimes it’s pretty ambiguous.

A grey area for me is the philosopher Martin Heidegger. He was a Nazi, and this definitely comes through in some of his philosophical work. Some of it doesn’t seem to be informed by his Naziism, but I’m still pretty averse to reading it, because how do we separate the person from the Naziism? If I were a philosopher, my own political viewpoints would inevitably permeate everything I wrote, even if the texts weren’t directly political. Perhaps I’d be better able to discern the line in Heidegger’s work if I were a philosopher.

I always worry about missing bad vibes in text, because especially as an adult, I have discovered many areas in which I didn’t even notice problematic things in media (antisemitism being one such area). I cringe when looking over Harry Potter as an adult, for example, and not just because of its author’s awfulness since the books were published.

I think we need to allow people the benefit of hindsight, as well as the space to have complicated feelings. Like, sometimes there might be some news that’s comes out about a person, which causes us to look over their work with a more critical or more mature eye. Without this space, people are much more likely to dig their heels in and refuse to change.

I’ve heard from a few transfem lesbian friends that one of the hardest parts of coming out to themselves as trans was that it would also mean acknowledging they’re not straight, because if you’re someone who feels like you’re failing at being a man, attraction to women can be pretty grounding. “It was the one normal thing about me” - whole lot of internalised misogyny/transphobia/homophobia.

But that’s our assumption, it’s true that it might just be a dude that likes being feminine, no trans involved.

Quite right; labels like straight get pretty wibbly in situations like this. I find it sad because the current prevalence of homophobia and transphobia makes it hard for us to collectively understand what would it mean to be a cis-het femboy who takes HRT — for us to conceptualise of a world where that isn’t a contradiction. Bigotry makes it harder for people to explore their true selves, regardless of their gender or sexuality.

Something I find annoying is that being effective at SEO means being in a constant war with people whose literal job it is to be good at SEO to trap me in useless crap.

I just skip the in-between stages — I’m a botnet pretending to be a woman

Archive link https://archive.ph/Ctwjf

Seconding the FOSS advice from the perspective of a fellow learner.

I’m a scientist first and foremost, so I’m learning programming on the side. A lot of code that’s written by scientists is pretty grim, so attempting to understand and contribute to FOSS projects has been useful in understanding how a complex project is organised, and how to read code as well as write it.

Contributing can be pretty small, even opening a git issue for a problem, or adding some info to an existing issue. You won’t be able to just dive in and start solving problems all over, and it can feel overwhelming to try as a relative beginner, but it massively improved my skills.

I really respect people who edit comments to acknowledge when they’re wrong, but leave the original mistake intact (but usually strike through). Like this:

I delete my comments when I’m proven wrong because it’s embarassing and I don’t want to perpetuate misinformation

Actually, I’m leaving my mistake up, because then people can follow the conversation easier and see how I came to realise I was wrong

I cannot count the times that I have gone through the legitimate path to read a paper, by clicking “AcCeS tHiS pApEr ThRoUgH yOuR iNsTItUtIoN” and I log in through my university, faffing with 2FA, only to be told “nah, you don’t have access”. I just go straight to scihub nowadays.

“In Sweden, having drugs in the bloodstream is punishable with prison”

Oh wow, I didn’t know that

What do you expect her to do instead?

What’s your favourite scent/scent note? (Either scent to work with if you make perfumes, or just something you personally enjoy for your own use)