skeletorfw

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

To be fair though, the people who fund the research are not the people who lose out if the publisher isn’t paid their £30. They are very often governmental or inter-governmental research agencies and programmes. Realistically it is rare for anyone except from the publisher to care about free distribution. The publishers are however pretty vicious (e.g. Swartz’s case).

Right, some advice from an allo person with an ace family member:

1. Dating and meeting people is hard, I’m sorry to say. Same as making friends, sometimes it just happens but most of the time it takes putting yourself out there in a meaningful and deliberate way.

2. Liking someone and being interested in dating them does not usually hit like a bolt from the blue. It often grows over a while. You’ll often have to build a friendship with someone before you build a relationship.

3. If you find someone tiring and boring, don’t date them. If you find everyone you meet boring and tiring after very little time then you have two options, either really challenge that preconception internally or consider whether you actually want to date.

If you want to date but aren’t ready to actually put in the time and effort to get to know people then you are really going to struggle. Are you going to want to date someone long term when you don’t even want to be connected to them for more than a few days?

There is also no guidebook, as much as it would be easier that way. People are individuals and dating requires you to see another as a person, not a puzzle to be solved. The only piece of advice that actually applies as a blanket is “be interested in them”. You need to actually take an interest in who they are, what they do, how they feel. Ask the questions and listen to the answers.

Good luck, truly. Learning how to do friendship and relationship stuff is fucking hard. But getting interested in people is the most rewarding approach to take (at least in my experience, and that of my close friends).

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.

My own classic was fiddling with the nvidia PRIME config to try and get rid of some very mildly irritating screen tearing. No graphics output at all. Now this is fixable of course, but it’s a pig.

And I’d decided to do this 2 hours before an incredibly important progress review meeting for my PhD.

Got it back with about 10 mins to spare and decided just to leave the driver config alone after that.

Bonus round

Also a friend managed to bork his ubuntu 16 laptop by trying to switch from unity to gnome and ending up with sort of neither. That was reinstall territory right there.

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.

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.

Yup, in my experience the best way to beat a rules lawyer is to be a better and funnier rulemaker.

So this sent me down an absolute rabbit hole. As a DM there’s a few ways I’d consider to stop this being entirely game-breaking:

• You could argue that the only thing strength before death shows is that you can activate strength before death between hitting 0 and getting knocked out. A wizard is no samurai. Therefore concentration spells are not allowed.
• You could argue that life steal requires life to steal, and as such you can’t life steal yourself.
• You could enforce the requirement of the figurine required for vampiric touch, then engineer a scenario to remove it at a critical moment and see if they realise.

Personally I would instead depart from RAW and point out a version of option 2, but a lenient one. Something like “you can do this but you are sapping your very essence to do it. Every time you do it, you permanently lose 10% of your HP” or “every time you do this you increase the number of death saving throws you must succeed before you die”. Or my personal favourite: “every time you do this you perturb the very laws of nature. Nature is rather fond of its laws and so decides to perturb you right back. Roll on this table to see what happens.” and make the table include the above alongside a few other things and maybe a roll on the wild magic table.

In the end I enjoy ingenuity but the role of DM gives you a lot of latitude to… handle… those who believe they found a loophole.

I can say with relative certainty that at least some applicants went for this visa as a long shot because they had other reasons to move to the UK and this gave a more flexible visa than the Skilled Worker visa (like the ability to change jobs without getting re-sponsored).

It was never gonna be the main reason for anyone to move here and completely misunderstood how academics make decisions about their location.