Contramuffin

Without another name change, I don't think that phrase will ever go away, for the simple fact that X as a name is too short and nondescript. In speech, X could refer to a someone you broke up with, or it could just be the beginning of another word, serving as a prefix. In text, it could refer to the actual letter itself, or the close button on a window, or a placeholder, or something NSFW.

There's simply too many ways that X can be interpreted that even if people associate Twitter with X, people will still specify "formerly Twitter" just to avoid confusion

Found someone nice. It was sheer chance, really. Met with a new neighbor and she had a crush on me. Was friends for a while. Years later decided to get into a relationship with her.

Portal! Chell may be silent, but it's directly stated that she got as far as she had due to sheer tenacity and resourcefulness

Also, Silksong, if you're willing to wait for its release in 2377 AD

Edit: here's some more (these are all fairly family-friendly):

*Celeste

*Crypt of the NecroDancer

*Spelunky 2

*A Hat in Time

*Slime Rancher

*Webbed

I am a researcher studying diseases. You have no idea how many mice get killed without generating any data. There's a rule in place whenever you want to work with animals that you need to plan ahead and only use as few animals as you need to get the data that you're looking for. But things in research basically never happen according to plan. It could be due to a variety of factors: unexpected failures, overlooked factors, technical errors, or just simple negligence when performing an experiment. A lot of data and samples obtained from killed mice are discarded for one or more of the above reasons.

I get that mouse experiments are important to prove that our findings can translate to actual living animals, but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the "useful data per mouse" ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.

Patriotic duck

Because Threads didn't federate. It turns out when they said that they'll federate, they actually meant "some time in the undisclosed future." And then Threads lost a lot of that initial marketing hype so everyone forgot about it.

Apparently Meta is currently testing federation for Threads, though? The problem about Threads federating isn't resolved, to be entirely clear. It was merely that everyone, Meta included, just decided to kick the can down the road and think about the issue later.

I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of decentralization. We don't decentralize in order to keep communities small. We decentralize so that normal people, the non-billionaires, can host Lemmy.

Let me explain. It starts with a simple premise: social media owned by companies can and will enshittify. If not right now, then they will in the future.

From this premise, we conclude that the only way to produce a healthy, self-sustaining social media is by having the people own it rather than a company. But this leads to a challenge: only companies and billionaires have the money to be able to host large social media sites. A large site requires a large server, and that requires a lot of money.

The Fediverse sidesteps this issue by only requiring people to have small servers, to keep costs low. But then that introduces a new problem, which is that small servers can't host the sheer number of people required to promote discussions and communities. So, the Fediverse makes a second innovation: have the small servers communicate with each other and share information, so that as a collective, the sum of the small servers becomes large enough to host a healthy community of users.

We federate across multiple sites because if we were to all pile into a single site, it would overload that site, and the poor chap who's running the server would have a terrible day trying to keep the site running.

The issue you're noticing (having multiple communities of the same topic) isn't really the intention of federation. That issue is just because a bunch of people from Reddit tried to make the same communities all at the same time without checking if the community already exists. The expectation is that, over time, communities with the same topic will consolidate, exactly as you predicted.

The hate jar has visible condensation. The moisture probably is driving the mold growth.

Same thoughts. Mainly because it's such a pain to explain how the library access system works in the previous family share.

First thing to do: reinstall windows. You keep your license, it's quick, but it removes all the bloatware on your computer

Not necessarily an acronym, but here's a fun one for Japanese: Laughing in Japanese is warau, which gets shortened when typing to just w. If you want to laugh a lot, you would type wwww. That ends up looking like a field of grass, so that in turn gets shortened into 草 (kusa, or grass). Basically, 草 is the Japanese equivalent of lol

Also, in Chinese, thank you is often abbreviated as 3q, because when you say it out loud, it sounds like "thank you" (san kyu)

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

Lack of computer literacy. When I was in school, we had computer classes that taught us how to use Word, Excel, even Photoshop and Illustrator, etc. And also things like proper netiquette. It seems like students nowadays are just expected to have computer literacy, and it's either not being taught anymore or is being taught in a severely diminished way. I'm extremely concerned by the number of younger students who don't know how to use Excel (or, frankly, anything that's not a social media website/app). Likewise, I believe the fact that young people are no longer taught to be wary of privacy on the internet (and are in fact encouraged to share their personal lives on the internet) is an oversight in education that will harm these people, as well as society, in the future

Nobody here seems to have read the article, so to clear things up: Onerep's CEO is the one running the people-search networks. Mozilla's CEO was not. (As far as we know.)

Mozilla dropping Onerep is a good thing. It shows that they respect user privacy.

Microbial pathogenesis here. This one's a fun one for me, especially since COVID revealed just how illiterate the average person is about diseases. Here's a couple that I think should be common sense

• Not all bacteria cause disease. In fact, very few bacteria cause disease. Many bacteria are even helpful to us, so you should really weigh the pros and cons of taking antibiotics if you're considering using antibiotics.

• Antibiotics don't work against viral infections. You're getting all the downsides of killing helpful bacteria and getting none of the benefits

• Do not blindly trust your immune system. Your immune system works 100% of 50% of the time. Many white blood cells take the philosophy of murdering everything in sight just to be safe. This can and often does include killing important cells in your body that just happen to be nearby the site of infection. Even if you survive the infection, you will be weakened as a result. If you can avoid getting sick in the first place, avoid getting sick.

• Vaccines work. I don't really know what else to say about this one.

• Viruses and bacteria aren't hard to kill. There's many compounds that can kill viruses and bacteria. But humans aren't hard to kill either. The tricky part is figuring out how to kill viruses and bacteria while also keeping the human alive. Basically: don't drink bleach. It will kill your bacteria or virus but it'll kill you too

• E. coli isn't a usually bad bacteria. Actually, it's a very important bacteria that helps us digest food. The reason it gets such a bad reputation is because it's relatively hard to kill, which makes them a very good way to quickly check if there's a possible food/water contamination. In other words, the presence of E. coli itself isn't bad, but finding E. coli does suggest that there might be other, more dangerous bacteria.

• DO NOT EAT MOLDY FOOD. The fuzzy part that you see is just the fruiting body of the mold, analogous to a flower on a plant. The real body of the mold is an invisible network of roots that tunnel through the core of the food. Even if you cut off the fuzzy portion, you're still eating most of the mold.

Parents' jobs aren't to protect their kids. It's to make sure that their kids are sufficiently prepared for the world when the kids grow up.

There seems to be this rising trend of parents being overprotective of their children, even to the point of having parental controls enabled for children even as old as the late teens. My impression has always been that these children are too sheltered for their age.

I grew up in the "age of internet anarchism," where goatse was just considered a harmless prank to share with your friends and liveleaks was openly shared. Probably not the best way of growing up, to be fair, but I think we've swung so hard into the opposite direction that a lot of these children, I feel, are living in their own little bubbles.

To some degree, it honestly makes sense to me why the younger generation nowadays is so willing to post their lives on the internet. When that's the only thing you can do on the internet, that's what you'll do

Isn't that just a government job with extra steps? I thought the point of UBI is that it's meant to be, you know, universal.

As a side note, people have this tendency to think that government programs must be means-tested. That is, there must be a criteria that is met before someone is eligible for the program. Same with your assumption in the post - you assume that it must be better to add a stipulation. There seems to be this natural skepticism that if there is no criteria, people will take advantage of the program. I want to challenge that skepticism.

Adding criteria for eligibility inherently means the government must establish a bureaucracy for checking that the criteria is met. This has two notable downsides that people tend to not consider. First, it causes an applicant to wait longer before they can hear back from the program. With existing programs, it sometimes takes months before someone hears back. This ends up discouraging anyone from applying, even if they meet all the criteria. After all, what's the point of receiving aid in 3 months if you need the aid now?

Second, it causes the cost of the program to increase. A bureaucracy is difficult to maintain. The more money that is spent on checking for eligibility, the less money that people in need will get. And what is the work that such a bureaucracy will do anyways? How does it benefit society to hire someone to say that people's needs aren't "real enough" to get government aid?

Which leads me to a third, additional point - it's morally questionable to require people to meet a certain criteria before they can receive aid. To put it in another way, why do you feel like you need to gatekeep other people's needs? If a person says they're struggling, why should anyone say that they're not struggling enough?

No, the point is that trump wouldn't use the right airpod, so it will always be at full charge

Asking ChatGPT for advice about anything is generally a bad idea, even though it might feel like a good idea at the time. ChatGPT responds with what it thinks you want to hear, just phrased in a way that sounds like actual advice. And especially since ChatGPT only knows as much information as you are willing to tell it, its input data is often biased. It's like an r/relationshipadvice or r/AITA thread, but on steroids.

You think it's good advice because it's what you wanted to do to begin with, and it's phrased in a way that makes your decision seem like the wise choice. Really, though, sometimes you just need to hear the ugly truth that you're making a bad choice, and that's not something that ChatGPT is able to do.

Anyways, I'm not saying that bosses are good at giving advice, but I think ChatGPT is definitely not better at giving advice than bosses are.

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."

My field of expertise is bacterial pathogenesis with a particular interest in pneumococcal pneumonia.

And it's true, immunology is ridiculously complex that no one person can ever hope to fully understand it. Immune cells are helpful or detrimental depending on the context, and sometimes even both. And we don't really fully know why. The problem is that pathogens and humans have been in an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, and unraveling all of that evolutionary technical debt is Fun™

To give an example, Toll-like receptors are one of the most important pathogen-detection mechanisms, and they were discovered just about 25 years ago and people only really figured out their importance about 20 years ago. There are researchers who have spent the majority of their careers before the discovery of one of the most crucial immune pathways.

We really don't know what's going on with immunology and to say otherwise is, as I've said, an outright lie. People seem to overestimate how much we know about the immune system, not knowing that we are still very much in the "baby phase" of immune research. The fact that we are able to do so much already is really kind of a testament to human ingenuity than anything

My personal experience is that people who claim to know completely about how the immune system works is more likely to be a science denier (or more likely, naive)

Great answers in general, but I just want to pitch in my answer, because this was how I was able to make it click, and maybe it'll help someone else

Let's imagine if a company wants to destroy a small group. In this case, Meta likely wants to destroy the Fediverse because it recognizes that the Fediverse could compete with Meta in the future. What can that company do? If you were that company, this is what you can do:

1. First, pretend to be nice and say that you want to work together with that group. You want a cooperation, and as a big company, you have the resources to make the group even better. The small group is ecstatic and accepts the cooperation.

2. At first, you do exactly what you said you would do. You put in 50% (or sometimes even more) of the effort, and the developers of the small group put in 50% of the effort. The cooperation seems pretty good and lots of work is getting done.

3. Over time, you slowly start putting in less and less work into cooperating. Maybe for one feature, you put in 40% of the work, then for the next, you put 30%, etc. Eventually, you're developing your own features without sharing your work with the devs of the small group, and the devs have to struggle to try to figure out what you did. Meanwhile, the devs still think you're acting in good faith, so they're still sharing their side of the work.

4. Users look at your platform and the small group's platform, and they think that the devs of the small group are just not really that competent. They don't realize that the reason why the small group seems to be lagging behind is because you're refusing to share your side of the work. Users start switching over to using your platform, since it's so the same content anyways, right? It's just less buggy and has more competent development, right?

5. Once most of the users have switched over, you then suddenly flip your stance and say that, really, cooperation isn't really working and that you want to stop cooperating. You break off from the small group, and since most of the users have already switched over to your platform, they leave your small group, not realizing that they've been duped. The sudden decrease in users in the small group completely devastates the group and the group never fully recovers.

The group could still exist after the break, but its reputation has been destroyed and people no longer see it as a viable alternative to big companies. As a result, even if the group remains standing, the user base will not grow any longer, and the group may even end up with fewer users than they started with.

How do we know for sure that what I said will happen? Because other tech companies have done this exact same thing before. In fact, it's so common that it's got its own name: EEE. So a lot of people here are seeing the writing in the wall. If Meta is offering a cooperation with the Fediverse, what do you think is the likelihood that they're actually wanting to cooperate in good faith?

Even ignoring that Marvel isn't leftist, I don't even think leftists think Marvel humor is good. OP's premise is broken on so many levels

What I like to say is that the universe is interesting enough as it is without needing to make anything up. Perhaps ghosts and demons and cryptids don't exist, but what about dark matter and dark energy? They make up the majority of the universe and we don't know what they are. Why did the Big Bang happen? What's inside a black hole? Are there aliens out there? How the heck are we even alive?

A big part of science is acknowledging that we really kind of don't know a lot about the world around us. Scientists regularly find things that just make us think, "Wait a second, this shouldn't have been possible..." Just because there are some things that we do know, doesn't mean that we know everything. And likely, we won't be able to know everything, even in the far future. It's ok to want a bit of mysticism! In fact, science encourages you to dream big and think about what sorts of things haven't been discovered yet. But there's too many dreams and too many undiscovered things, and you need to pick and choose which things to get excited about.

Why get excited about demons when you can discover where the demons came from and which group of humans named them? Why get excited about cryptids when 90% of species are still undiscovered and the ocean trenches are virtually completely unexplored? In the same vein that a friend who responds to your messages is more interesting than a friend who ghosts you, wouldn't it also be true that a field that promises real unknowns and consistent discoveries is more interesting than a field that maybe, possibly might have discoveries?

To put it bluntly, if you think science isn't full of unknowns and hopes and dreams, then you're not digging deep enough!

It sounds less like you're missing your ex, and more like that you're disappointed in the fact that the relationship failed. It sounds like you built up an expectation of your relationship with your ex, and when that ended up falling through, you feel let down. And it sounds like you can't decide whether to put the blame on her or yourself.

If I'm reading that correctly, I think the best thing to do is to acknowledge this fact, that the issue is not that you're missing the relationship, but that you're struggling with the emotional letdown when your relationship ended up being less ideal than you initially planned. Because if you keep thinking that the issue is that you're missing her subconsciously, you're going to get led to the wrong solutions. For instance, putting blame on you or her isn't going to solve the actual issue.

If we take this premise to be true, then I think addressing the real issue probably comes down to thinking about what your expectations were and thinking about how the relationship was never going to meet those expectations from the beginning (based on the examples that you gave). Ultimately, I don't know your situation, and I'm not a therapist. But that's my interpretation of what you wrote

What kind of suggestions are these? Making it illegal to be single? Is this some sort of incel/femcel shit?

Isn't it a good thing that men no longer feel like being in a relationship is a necessity? A relationship should be something that people opt into, it shouldn't be a default state of being.

Describing my job? Yeah, sure. I do science.

Explaining my job? Hell no. Nobody is willing to read a 20 page lit review to start to understand the background of what I do

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

Outer Wilds (not Outer Worlds)

Ori and the Blind Forest

Hollow Knight

Plants vs. Zombies. EA bought out Popcap and kicked out the developer after he refused to add monetization to Plants vs. Zombies 2

Honestly, steam deck lol

It's an odd form factor that people don't really have much experience with, hence they don't really know how useful it'll be to them. To be fair to myself, I had been holding back on purchasing one until maybe a year after the initial launch, so I think I would personally describe my experience as a leap of faith.

In any case, it turns out to be a great little thing. There's a lot of games in my backlog that don't feel "desktop-y," and therefore I've never played them, if that makes sense. But with a handheld form factor, now I have more motivation to go through those games. Emulation on the steam deck has also been great, for a similar reason. And sometimes I just want to be in bed than on my desktop. Or sometimes I'm just on the bus or waiting for something.

I think SteamOS also taught me how usable Linux was, and that's been pretty instrumental in getting me to minimize my Windows dependence

I was in MathCounts in middle school. MathCounts is a competitive math club for middle schoolers. Think of it as just taking the SAT for fun.

The club advisor was a woman that we'll call Ms. Audrey. She isn't actually a teacher, and really her position in the school is sort of a gray area. All we really know is that she's been with the school since its inception, and she holds a lot of influence over the school's admins. It may be because the school admins view MathCounts performance as good marketing to show that the school is doing well academically, but that's just my speculation.

In any case, her life is math. That's basically all she does. She even has a husband with a doctorate in math. Actually, she would have been the most valid candidate to be the club advisor, if not for the fact that she was extremely harsh and abusive toward the club members. If a club member gets a question wrong during practice tests, then she would single them out and have them stand in front of the room, and force the member to try to solve that question correctly while yelling at him that he should have solved it correctly the first time. Of course, a student doesn't willingly get questions wrong, so when this happens, the student has no idea how to solve the question the correct way and the entire club ends up wasting a good 10 minutes watching that one student try to solve the question through trial and error. It's terrible for the student and it's terrible to everyone else watching.

To make up for the inefficient use of time, Ms. Audrey mandates that club members need to spend 3-4 hours after school on the club, Monday through Friday. Essentially, we finish school at 6pm earliest, and we regularly go past 7pm and sometimes into 8pm. She also hosts additional "optional" practice sessions on the weekends and over the holidays. Also, she assigns practice tests as homework.

She once kept our competition awards hostage. When asked about it, she just said that she needed it for something and that she'll give it to us "later." I later secretly went in to the room and took my award anyways.

Once, she lost one of her binders. I'm not sure what was in it, and frankly, I don't care to wonder. But she seemed to have thought that it was really important, because she launched an entire "investigation" into who took the binder.

Her idea of an investigation is to wait until a club member is alone, then ask that club member to sit in the teacher's lounge. She would then "leave" to do something else and let the student sit for 10 minutes. When she returned, her entire demeanor was different, and she would insist that the student "confess for what they did." She would say that other club members saw that student do it and that she already knows that the student did it, but she just needed the student to say it. She would threaten severe consequences unless the student confess. And she would pressure the student until they start crying. If still the student didn't say anything, she would conclude that the student was innocent and didn't take her binder. Repeat for the other club members until she found someone who confessed. Of course, it turns out that nobody took her binder.

I think none of the club members knew any better, and so none of them left. A lot of members were also pressured by their families into staying because "Ms. Audrey is overqualified and she gets results."

I'm not quite sure what it is about me, but when I joined, Ms. Audrey kind of fixated on me. She somehow came to the conclusion that I had "enormous untapped potential for math," and she made it her job to try to activate that untapped potential. To be entirely fair to her, I was good at math. I was a quick learner and I was able to solve some of the problems that other people couldn't solve. But I think she vastly overestimated my potential, or at least she was terrible at activating my potential. And very quickly I became a major target of a lot of her abuse, when I wasn't living up to her ideas on my mathematical abilities. I ended up hating math as a subject, and when I finally got to high school, I had an entire career plan shift. Now I'm a biologist, where I don't need to touch math at all.

How does immunology work?

Pro tip: nobody understands immunology and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying

Heaven's Vault, Hardspace Shipbreaker, and both Subnautica games.

Heaven's Vault is a puzzle game where you have to learn to translate an unknown language. Haven't gotten too deep into the game yet, but I picked it up because I liked Chants of Sennaar, which has a similar premise. Chants is 25% off right now, so I think that's a decent recommendation

Hardspace Shipbreaker is a casual game where you break down spaceships for parts. It seemed fun, and I wanted to have something casual to balance out my library, which currently has more intense games than I would like.

Subnautica is a survival game where you're stuck on an ocean world. I'm honestly not too sure if I would like this one too much, since I'm not too much of a fan of survival games. It just seemed unique enough from the other survival games, and it had a decent deal, and it was in my wishlist for a while. So I acted a bit on impulse and bought both games (Subnautica and Subnautica Below Zero)

Because the ones that we hear about are the ones that are good enough to have even made it out of Japan. If a game was bad, it wouldn't be localized to an English-speaking audience, and we wouldn't even know it exists.

It's the same sort of thinking as asking why (insert media here) was better in the past. The answer is simple - good songs, games, movies, etc. tend to be more memorable, and so we remember the good ones and forget the bad ones. To put it briefly, there's survivorship bias.

No, I don't think there's an ulterior motive. Reddit kicked out all the active mods and mods who knew what they were doing, and then brought in people with zero mod experience. Of course you're going to get more issues with mod abuse now. Not everyone has the temperament to be a responsible mod, and I think Reddit is simply reaping the consequences of its choices

Definitely not. The same reason back then as it is now. Namely: I don't trust Meta to not try to destroy the fediverse

You are young, and that is normal.

My advice is to remind yourself that girls are people, too. If I focus on the fact that I'm talking to a person, and I ignore the fact that that person is a girl, then I find that I act more normally around them. I think the girls appreciate that, too, since if you act uncomfortable, then they will feel uncomfortable too.

My belief is that college is a means to an end. That is, you go in with an explicit goal of achieving so-and-so, and achieving it will directly help you achieve so-and-so after college. For instance, say you want to be a doctor, and to be a doctor you need a degree. Or you want to become an engineer, and to be an engineer you need a degree. These are valid reasons to go to college.

I find that a lot of students go to college because they think they need to go to college. Or because they think it gets them a higher paying job, but they don't know which job it is that they want, just that it'll be a high paying job. Or because they want the degree for the bragging rights. Or to satisfy their parents. I interpret these goals as stemming from the belief that finishing college is the ultimate goal, and that as long as you finish college, you're guaranteed a satisfying life.

Having these kinds of goals, I think, aren't going to get you to make the most of college, and frankly, I believe that having these sorts of goals are fundamentally misaligned with what the college experience offers students.

I don't know what your situation is like, but I believe that the solution to your question lies in answering this more fundamental question: why are you going to college? And is your reason because you plan to use college as a stepping stone for a more ultimate goal?

Yeah, people tend to have that problem, especially if they're treating it like driving a car. If you want to fly manual, never fly more than 400 m/s, because then you won't have enough time to slow down.

My actual advice though is to just use autopilot. People seem to forget that you can cancel autopilot. If you start to see that there's something getting in your way, cancel the autopilot and push the ship to the left or right (it's easier to go around the planet than to slow down). Once you're clear, resume autopilot.